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Thread: Sopranos finale

  1. #21
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    Above I posted that they paid tribute to most of the show's main characters. They also paid tribute to the show's main locales: Satriale's; the Bing; Tony's house; a therapist's office. It's amazing how much he managed to get into 61 minutes that I am sure were much more tightly edited than it seemed.

    And, of course, to music, some of which we didn't hear but saw only as titles on a jukebox. Every episode ends with such evocative music . . . except this one, which just ends.
    Last edited by mapei; 06-11-2007 at 12:37 PM. Reason: grammar

  2. #22
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    Life in the Real Mob

    Quote Originally Posted by wilson View Post
    As for Carmela, Meadow, and AJ, they are complicit in the whole thing. It's of course never explicitly acknowledged, but they know what Tony does (especially after going on "DEFCON 4," as AJ put it, during the war). They benefit greatly from the nicer side of his work (the money, the respect, etc.). But they also wear part of the target that is constantly on his back. Sure, they might be about to get whacked in the diner, but they might be about to get whacked anywhere, at any time. That's life for them, and as Tony reminded us, "once you're in this family, there's no getting out."
    If this subject matter interests you, there's an excellent book written by Henry "Goodfellas" Hill's children about growing up in a real mob family. The bad far, far outweighs the good. It's called On the Run: A Mafia Childhood. Here's a link to Amazon.

    http://www.amazon.com/Run-Mafia-Chil...1581153&sr=8-1
    Rich
    "Failure is Not a Destination"
    Coach K on the Dan Patrick Show, December 22, 2016

  3. #23
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    After reflection

    Quote Originally Posted by calltheobvious View Post
    I think that if David Chase walked through my front door right now, my wife would kill him. We both feel so...so used.
    Last night, I would have been happy to help your wife. I nearly yelled at my husband for messing with the remote, until he looked at me with the same accusatory stare; it took us a good 30 seconds before recovering enough to comment.

    This morning, however, I think David Chase is brilliant. I can't think of how else the show could have ended, that would have been as thought-provoking or as much in the spirit of the show. Now I want the DVD, to hear the running commentary.

    I also want the Season soundtrack, to pay closer attention to the lyrics. HBO ran a special earlier this spring, on the "Music of The Sopranos," and Chase mentioned that he was VERY deliberate about what music he used; I think that was quite obvious in the finale.

  4. #24
    Disliked it last night, dislike it today. A great show should NOT end with "Oh man, he REALLY made you feel like something was GOING to happen, but nothing ever did!" I am sorry, I understand all of the levels of depth and all that, but in the end I think it was just a lame attempt to leave it open enough for a movie, nothing more. Money money money.

  5. #25
    Nah. No movie.

    The ending speaks to the impossibility of 'closure' for something this big. It encompassed virtually every aspect of loyalty, love, brutality, betrayal. It was about life and the shadow of death. How do you 'wrap that up'????

    You can't in any comprehensively explicit way. Chase would have failed miserably had he tried.

    This ending was the only one, IMO, that allows for the viewer to truly begin to understand the magnitude and the scope of the first 80 hours. To reflect on the endless complexity and possibilities that the show so incredibly portrayed.

    A movie would truly destroy everything. I can't imagine Chase isn't aware of this, and regards his masterpiece complete in its incompleteness.

  6. #26
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    Angry yesterday, mollified today.

    I don't think there is any way that Tony got killed in the last scene. I think the music, the camera angles, the carefully crafted tension were all deliberate to show Tony living in his own personal hell, even when the people he loves most is around him. If you can't enjoy a casual dinner with your family, how does that speak to your quality of life? In a way, Tony's fate is worse than death. In addition, if Tony got popped in the last scene, the gunman would've at least walked next to Tony to try to avoid killing his family-- that's the mafia way (Phil's death illustratees this point). As such, I think Chase would've at least shown the guy coming out of the bathroom.

    In all, great ending to a great show. (I would LOVE a DVD with alternate endings though...)

  7. #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by mapei View Post
    I absolutely loved the episode. Maybe not the actual screen-goes-blank part, though I'm OK with it. The possibility that the screen goes blank because Tony is whacked is a very intriguing one.
    ...
    Bravo.
    When the screen went blank, my immediate thought was that maybe T got it from one of the other diner patrons...so I was expecting something else---say, a montage of Tony's life or "Anthony Soprano, 1960-2007"----to come up on the screen and when it didn't, hmmmm... But seems that killing Tony at the end would have been anti-climactic; after all, he's been shot before, seen the white light, etc. and lived to tell about it. Hub almost had me convinced that T was going to get the Big One at the end and I'd kind of fingered AJ (gone completely bonkers) as the one to do it. While the ending might not have been satisfactory to everyone (what an understatement! anybody see the people on the evening news venting about this?), it seems to be in keeping with the way many other episodes ended...as in "what happens next?".

  8. #28
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    I just don't agree that "nothing happened." Man, if you take the season as a whole, *everything* happened: Tony's most trusted three lieutenants are gone; one of his underlings has flipped. That in itself is MAJOR. In business, Tony is alone (effectively; Paulie and Patsy can't substitute for Sil and Christopher, not to mention Bobby). He is almost certain to be prosecuted. Why should we have to see more to know that?

    Meanwhile, Phil got what was coming to him. AJ, after showing occasional signs of growing up, is replanted in the family and the Family, poised to inherit all that means. Meadow is, too.

    Junior is irretrievably gone mentally. Janice is already plotting her next moves. Carmela remains committed to her bargain with the devil. Melfi has cut Tony off.

    The main message is that Tony is alone with his vulnerability and his demons, and quite likely a prosecution. THAT is the show's conclusion. But his nuclear family, morally compromised though it is, remains. Tying things up in a neater bundle than that wouldn't have been worthy of the moral ambiguity at the heart of the show. I get the impression that some viewers thought this was a formulaic crime drama that needed not just a conclusion, but one with more blood, or least handcuffs. Why?

  9. #29
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    As someone who does not watch the show and did not watch the finale, I have tried to stay out of this... until now.

    People in the diner in the final scene last night:

    The guy at counter was Nicky Leotardo, Phil's nephew. Hmmm. Amazing that he would be in the same dinner as Tony. Why would he be there?

    The 2 black guys were the ones that tried to shoot Tony in an earlier season but missed and clipped his ear. I wonder if they noticed that a former target of theirs was right next to them and vulnerable.

    The truck driver was the brother of someone robbed and killed by Christopher in season 2.

    And finally-- do any of you remember the conversation that Bobby and Tony had two episodes ago in the boat? The conversation where they talked about getting whacked? Tony said if you were to get whacked, you would never see it coming and it would just be like everything went black all of a sudden.

    Check your DVR. That is what folks in the business call foreshadowing.

    -Jason "if folk spaid half as much attention to the Sopranos as they do to Lost, this ending would have been called predictible " Evans

  10. #30
    Jason, MSNBC has an article up disputing the NY Times' take on the extras in the last scene (don't know how to link, sorry). Still, count us among those who believe Tony got whacked... and for Tony, there would be no "light" to go to. Only darkness.

    The scene that showed what a "Me-Burger-With-I-Sauce" he was? Going to see A.J.'s shrink to ostensibly discuss his son's future... and instead talking about his difficult relationship with his own "mudder." As Carmela rolled her eyes, lol.

    Don't think there will be a movie, but, whaddya gonna do?????
    Last edited by edensquad; 06-12-2007 at 08:22 AM. Reason: spelling

  11. #31
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    Not As Ambiguous or Bleak as Everyone Is Saying

    1. Tony's personal demon, the one betrayal he could never resolve, that involving his mother, got resolved when he took the mushrooms. How can you tell; no more ducks. You guys forgot the ducks. In the final scene before it turned night, Tony looked to the sky. The sky was empty. The ducks and what they symbolized, the belonging that Tony sought, were gone; as Tony told Melphi, he had figured it out; mothers are the bus drivers to life; problems come when you insist on trying to get back on the bus. So, Tony, the part of him we can all identify with, prevailed over his personal demon. The sky was clear.

    2. The final scene was ambiguous only because we wanted it to be, because we ain't mobsters and Tony is. No way Tony was in danger. Phil went off the reservation when he offed the boss; he had a deranged and narcassistic view of "their thing," that made him the ultimate arbitrator of who fit and who did not. The guys in his crew had every reason to fear that Phil would turn on them or at least put them in unnecessary danger with all the moves he was making. They wanted him gone before they ever met with Tony. So they were not going to take Tony out. No way. So that leaves Paulie. Paulie always seemed to be on the edge, but his actions particularly in the last episode put to rest any notion that Paulie would make a move on Tony if he wanted to, which he clearly did not. Not that he didn't consider it, clearly he did; just that it made no practical sense and also was outside of where, in the end, Paulie's identification lied. He was a formidable part of Tony's thing, their thing; there was in his life nothing else.

    3. So what of those guys in that seedy restaurant and what was Tony doing there to begin with. The guys were Jersey tough guys. They probably recognized Tony, and were catching glances of someone of superstar quality who was way out of their class. Not someone they would even dream of messing with. What were they to do but steal a furtive glance. Tony knew that they were looking and why. He was amused by it. Here Chase I think was unfair; went way too far with music and camera in creating the impression that something ominous was going to happen, when logically, that was clearly outside the realm of possibility. Tony, the mobster, fully understood that; we, on the other hand, only thought we understood the game. Happily, none of us really do. Perhaps that that is what Chase was trying to tell us; Tony is a mobster and we ain't.

    4. So, why the seedy restaurant? Tony's business clearly had taken a big hit (no pun intended) and he was about to be incurring some astronomical attorney fees. No time to be spending big. Life would be scaled way back for who knows how long, and Tony might well be going away.

    5. A word or two about the kids. The daughter learned that she could never live in the legit world when her boyfriend dumped her on return to California and his old man found out whom her daddy was. She was a realist and would suffer no such disappointments again. She would fight them as a high-priced lawyer, using her own wounds as all the motivation she needed to prevail professionally and personally. I think AJ is in far better shape than many suggest. He had a narrow brush with suicide, but seems to have healed some from his broken heart and the negativity that that bereavement caused. So far he has avoided the venality that infuses his father's life, and his father's before him. If he ends up being less the man than one might hope, he also has a decent chance of avoiding being the mobster that his lineage would seem to have demanded.

    So, Chase left very little ambiguous, in my opinion. We know that this thing of theirs, this mafia, has received a tremendous, perhaps fatal, blow, and that Tony faces the prospect of a long and financially draining trial that could end up with him in jail (somehow I doubt that and so does Tony; as his lawyer told us, they had been preparing for this for some time; also, most all the go-betweens are dead, and the Feds are not the only ones capable of squeezing Carlo). At the same time, Tony has overcome the demon that haunted him his own life, and has his family around him closer and more whole than at anytime that we knew them. While his surroundings will be shabbier, Tony got no problem with that. He has Phil overseeing a cash cow, and for the time being he is still eating steak. However diminished, his life and this thing still go on.

    Did Chase really have to spell all that out?

  12. #32
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    Quote Originally Posted by JasonEvans View Post

    -Jason "if folks paid half as much attention to the Sopranos as they do to Lost, this ending would have been called predictable" Evans
    Sure, if by paying attention you mean making up theories on nonexistent and imaginary evidence.

    The Sopranos is a drama, not a puzzle or an interactive web event. It shouldn't be treated like a show that too often acts like a Sudoku game masquerading as a story.
    Last edited by Duvall; 06-12-2007 at 06:31 AM.

  13. #33
    alteran is offline All-American, Honorable Mention
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    Quote Originally Posted by greybeard View Post
    1. Tony's personal demon, the one betrayal he could never resolve, that involving his mother, got resolved when he took the mushrooms. How can you tell; no more ducks. You guys forgot the ducks. In the final scene before it turned night, Tony looked to the sky. The sky was empty. The ducks and what they symbolized, the belonging that Tony sought, were gone; as Tony told Melphi, he had figured it out; mothers are the bus drivers to life; problems come when you insist on trying to get back on the bus. So, Tony, the part of him we can all identify with, prevailed over his personal demon. The sky was clear.
    Well, Tony's rant/whine about his mother during his and Carmela's visit to AJ's shrink would seem to imply that the wounds aren't completely healed, but otherwise I think you've nailed a lot of stuff here.

    I disagree with Jason's contention that the conclusion is "obvious." In fact, it is decidedly and deliberately NOT obvious. I think all the talk about "you don't see the bullet coming, you just fade to black" is a clear, intended message. Tony had no field of vision to the bathroom where WiseGuy Tough #1 went to the bathroom and hence the wiseguy could nail Tony pretty much unawares.

    On the other hand, Chase is all about music. The music that was VERY deliberately chosen, was unnecessarily featured in the camera work, was a song called "Don't Stop Believin'" by a band called Journey, and featured lines like, "the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on." Not to mention the fact that the gang war was over, and if someone wanted to cap Tony, this was a spectacularly bad time to do it. Even if someone was trying to cap Tony, Tony was at a restaurant which was certainly "out of his routine."

    You can obviously make a good case for reading this one either way. Going by just the show itself, I think the case is somewhat stronger for "everything goes black"-- I can't put my finger on it exactly why I feel this way, but it seems the most "Chase-ian."

    But then there's this thing called the real world. In the real world, 1) HBO holds the rights to The Sopranos and has a legally actionable fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders, 2) James Gandolfini and Edie Falco will ALWAYS be Tony and Carmella Soprano and will want to work, 3) David Chase will start to look back nostalgically on the 86 episodes of Sopranos he made and some combination of money and inspiration will get to him-- and 4) five or ten years from now we will get a Sopranos movie, and yes, Tony will be in it.

    If you don't believe me, I've got 5 words for you-- "Now Who's Being Naive, Kay?" ;-)

    I think Chase made this obvious conclusion himself, and we all know he left the door wide, wide open for this inevitability.

    I do not hate the ending the way I did when I first saw it, but I am not in love with it now, either. It is certainly clever how pretty much everyone will make the conclusion they want about it-- Tony dead/alive, ending brilliant/lame, movie never/inevitable. In fact, my biggest problem with it is that it is just too "Princess and the Tiger" for me-- a bit too self-satisfied and "clever."

    Could I do better? Heck no.

    But Chase sure could have.

  14. #34
    I see Network TV Jason is still a little defensive of his lack of HBO cred :^) So much so that he's passing along a hoax. I don't have the link either, but it's been debunked. The guy at the counter is credited as "Members Only Jacket Guy" not "Nikki Leotardo, Jr." The guy playing him had never acted on the Sopranos before and in real life he's the proprietor of a local pizza parlor who knows a producer or something like that. So far no evidence has been presented on the trucker. And if I recall, at least one of the two guys who tried to pop Tony a few seasons back was himself killed in retaliation, but I could be wrong. Personally, when I watched that scene, there was nothing in the least bit menacing about the two black guys entering the restaurant. The ominous overtones were reserved for Members Only Jacket Guy and very slightly for USA cap trucker.

    The scene as a whole had an element of Norman Rockwell surface (teenage lovers, boy scouts, USA cap), and the multi-racial makeup of the patrons added to the first half of the picture. The twist is that there's a killer in the middle of the room whose presence upends the whole pastoral. At least to me. Here's a panoply of American cliches gathered in one room, except the all-American family entry includes a coldblooded killer mobster. For a show that exploded the cliches of an entire genre and insisted there's a lot more than what you see on the surface, that's the perfect symbolic ending.

    Much speculation and comment has been put forth regarding the conversation Tony and Bobby had on the boat, just maybe not in this thread on this board. We're not that dense to have not considered the connection! Anyway, I think the real irony is that Bobby was apparently incorrect, at least with respect to himself. He didn't see it coming, but he didn't get a bullet to the back of the head and go instantly black. By the way, that was 5 or 6 episodes back, not 2.

    It's interesting to read greybeard's interpretations. I disagree 180 with most of them, but they're all totally plausible. Personally, I see an indictment of each and every character, especially each of the Sopranos, and our culture in general, through an ending in which it's revealed that no single character has grown up, come to any self-realizations, stood by their convictions in any meaningful way, redeemed themselves or been freed from the mob life generally.

    Everyone takes their own conclusions and impressions from good art, I guess.

  15. #35
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    alteran and greybeard both have great insights. It's all debatable, but that's sorta the point IMO.

    I don't know that Chase could have done better, though he certainly has enough genius that it's possible. I for one did not want to witness Tony mortally wounded, and if he had been taken away in handcuffs it would have seemed too "storybook," something I might expect of a lesser show. Likewise if he had taken his own life. It would have been highly unsatifying if he had gone into witness protection or somehow escaped trouble altogether, fat and happy. I have an extremely hard time imagining an ending that would have left viewers satisfied.

    One intriguing possibility might have been Paulie walking over to the NY side, leaving Tony even more profoundly isolated. Or one or more of his nuclear family deserting him and/or even flipping. Those possibilities might have had some narrative "weight" to them. But personally I prefer the ending we got.

    Added on edit: Mal slipped. More good points.
    Last edited by mapei; 06-12-2007 at 11:52 AM.

  16. #36
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    Chase Should Have Done So Good

    Alteran and Mal, in particular, bravo! Very, very good stuff here.

  17. #37
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    In retrospect...well done

    David Chase did get exactly what he wanted, thought provoking insightful conversation by viewers. Had this been a true story of course we would all know how it ends. Even if he made alternative endings, folks would be selective but with limited reasoning. This fade out has produced precisely what you see here, grand conversation. He is a genius.

  18. #38
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    Personally, I've arrived at a point where I really don't think the "fade to black" was Tony's death, but it really doesn't matter. Before the finale even aired, I told my best friend & Sopranos viewing buddy, "Whether or not we get to see it, Tony is doomed." Furthermore, the series' lack of resolution is perfect in that it provoked considerable thought and conversation, as we've established. But another thing has occurred to me:
    Chase hasn't just denied tidy resolution to the viewers, but also (and I think, more importantly), to Tony Soprano. Even if the series had ended with him in the slammer or on the slab, both unpleasant outcomes, Tony would have the peace that comes with an "end." Tony's choices, however, have trapped him in a reality (a "personal hell," someone here called it) where that end will arrive possibly (probably?) very suddenly and almost certainly unpleasantly. Where, when, and how that end comes doesn't matter, because Tony has chosen a life wherein, in many ways, he himself doesn't matter. The tender moments, like the series' final one, pointed out by AJ (?!?!?!), are forever tainted by the cloud that Tony has invited upon himself. Also, even though he's the boss, he's a mere cog in a machine that was running long before he took its reins and that will continue long after he's gone. The constant spectre of death is enough of a burden, but Tony has two other tortuous thins to confront: a) that spectre cheapens all of his life's moments that should theoretically be free of it, and b) his "work" is something that has been done before, and will be done in the future, in pretty much the same way he does it. So, in exchange for his toils, he has little in the way of a personal legacy, and considerable guilt at having not only killed/ruined countless people, but also having ensnared his biological family in "this thing of [theirs]". As evidenced by Phil's demise, Tony's death is even unlikely to leave a great mark, except upon the (comparatively) innocent, peripheral players in his life's drama, all of whom get reduced to detritus in his wake. Lastly, loneliness is a slow creep for Tony. One by one, his closest associates have met with gruesome ends: Big http://www.dukebasketballreport.comh...ballreport.com, Bobby, Silvio (and that's to say nothing of the Apriles, Ralphie, Vito, et. al.). So while his profession clearly isolates him ever so gradually, he has no choice but to continue in it until, one day, it consumes him too. The only question is, will it consume him via a bullet, like the aforementioned colleagues, slow decay, like Junior, or simply via the clink? (I operate under the assumption that T would never flip, but I suppose you never know.) All alternatives are spectacularly unappealing. In any case, after Tony's gone, the machine keeps running without him, and just as it does during his own tortured life, "the movie goes on and on and on."
    The release of tidy resolution would indeed be sweet for Tony (as well as some viewers), but his life almost by definition can't end with sweet release...it has to just go black.
    Last edited by wilson; 06-12-2007 at 01:40 PM.

  19. #39
    FYI ... the black guys who walked in couldn't have been the ones who tried to kill him under Junior's orders. Both of them died. One shot the other by accident, and Tony got the other one right before hitting the parked car sending him to the hospital.

  20. #40
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    I Still Can't See It

    How could Tony possibly have been taken out in that last scene. By whom and why. We know all the players; who would do it? Why?

    To me, the build up by Chase clearly implies the possibility that Tony gets it in the restaurant, but only through the viewer's uninformed and biased eyes. We are expecting it, were expecting it, bought into it for the entire season, seduced into it by the music and filming of the final scene. But, if you take our bias out of the picture, the scene really is quite tame and an assassination at that point makes no sense, not then, not there. Next month, who knows, it is only a business, and enemies are easy to make.

    Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

    The worst part of the program in all its years imo was the Melphi outting. Seems that a lot must have been left on the cutting room floor preceeding that dinner party. The only way her shrink's actions make any sense is if he is alarmed by news that a gang war is afoot and he fears that Melphi will wind up in the middle of it. Otherwise, his behavior and hers is hard to understand. Does she really need a social science study to know that she is enabling a mobster? Please. On the other hand, she knows that the ducks are gone, and her name is mud among her colleagues unless she does this thing. Tony would understand, it was only business. In fact, he did.

    By the way, a point well taken about that scene with AJ's shrink. Wounds heal, the scars remain. When Tony empathizes with AJ, he walks close to the fire. But, in the end, the ducks were gone from the picture.
    Last edited by greybeard; 06-12-2007 at 04:29 PM.

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